Experimental Blog # 161

Quotations and comments from "Plutocrats - The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"The rise of the 1 percent is a global phenomenon .."
"The 1 percent is outpacing everyone else in the emerging economies as well."
"Today two terrifically powerful forces are driving economic change: the technology revolution and globalization."

"Globalization is working - the world overall is getting richer. But a lot of the costs of that transition are being borne by specific groups of workers in the developed West."
" ..Credit Suisse calculated that there were about 29.6 million millionaires < > in the world, about half a percent of the total global population. North Americans .. account for 37 percent .. 37.2 percent .. are European ..Asia-Pacific is home to ..19.2 percent .. there are just over 1 million in China{3.4 percent}."

"Forbes classifies 840 of the 1,226 people on its 2012 billionaire ranking as self-made."

"In 2011, after Viktor Yanukovych, whose candidacy was backed by several eastern Ukrainian oligarchs, was elected president, he imprisoned Ms. Tymoshenko, in a politically motivated case redolent of Mikhail Khodorkovsky."
"When it comes to the creation of twenty-first-century billionaires, the USSR's sale of the century is also the most powerful driver, more important than Silicon Valley's technological revolution or the flourishing of finance on Wall Street and in the city of London."
"The fire sale of the assets of the former Soviet Union stands out because it marked such a sharp shift from nearly total state ownership ..But it was also part of a wider global trend."

" .. the seventy richest members of the NPC{National People's Congress in China} made more money in 2011 than the total combined net worth of all the members of all three branches of U.S. government - the president and his cabinet, both houses of congress, and the justices of the supreme court{all 660 members of the three federal branches}."!!
" .. there were 271 billionaires in China in 2011 .."
"China's plutocrats don't fight the state because they are the state - and when any of them forget that, they are treated with summary brutality: between 2003 and 2011, at least fourteen Chinese billionaires were executed."!!{also quoted as a fact in blog # 154}.